Wyndham Lewis's Vorticism and Young British Art

University of Bristol Department of Historical Studies Best undergraduate dissertations of 2011 Thomas Brooks Wyndham Lewis's Vorticism and Young British Art The Department of Historical Studies at the University of Bristol is com- mitted to the advancement of historical knowledge and understanding, and to research of the highest order. We believe that our undergraduates are part of that endeavour. In June 2009, the Department voted to begin to publish the best of the an- nual dissertations produced by the department’s final year undergraduates (deemed to be those receiving a mark of 75 or above) in recognition of the excellent research work being undertaken by our students. This was one of the best of this year’s final year undergraduate dissertations. Please note: this dissertation is published in the state it was submitted for examination. Thus the author has not been able to correct errors and/or departures from departmental guidelines for the presentation of dissertations (e.g. in the formatting of its footnotes and bibliography). © The author, 2011. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the prior permission in writing of the author, or as expressly permitted by law. All citations of this work must be properly acknowledged. Candidate Number: 26386 WYNDHAM LEWIS’S VORTICISM AND YOUNG BRITISH ART Dissertation submitted for the Degree of B.A. Honours in History of Art 2011 Table of Contents Introduction: From Blast to Freeze 1 1. Avant-gardism 3 2. Populism 14 3. Sensationalism 27 Conclusion: From Vortex to Vacuum 41 Bibliography 45 List of Illustrations 48 1 Introduction: From Blast to Freeze The self-consciously radical has always occupied a special place in the history of English art: reduced to a handful of vital episodes in an otherwise dreary story. Two of these seemingly rare moments stand in particular to be tested against one another. At opposite ends of the twentieth century, Wyndham Lewis’s 1914 magazine Blast and the 1988 exhibition Freeze have been remembered as volcanic eruptions into their domestic artworlds.1 Their statuses in this respect have been ensured by their role as monumental points of origin for their respective movements. Whilst Blast announced the razor-sharp geometries of Vorticism, routinely termed as England’s ‘only truly avant-garde movement’, Freeze has come to mark the tangible beginnings of another new (and now sole proprietor of the term) ‘Young British Art’.2 This is a fitting point at which to introduce the primary theme of my argument. Blast and Freeze are little more than creation myths; the convenient and retrospectively established beginnings necessitated by the narrative art historical form shared by Vorticism and Young British Art. Although Blast is often referred to as the genesis of avant-garde modernism in England, for example, Lewis had been developing a ‘Vorticist’ idiom in his art for several years before either Vorticism or Blast were conceived. According to Charles Harrison, the magazine has ‘staked its claim to a place in history with a remarkable éclat’.3 Equally, Freeze has been canonised on the terms inscribed by critics such as Sarah Kent, writing for the official 1 I feel that I must justify my reasons for assigning Lewis sole responsibility for Vorticism. Although many art historians have argued that this stance unfairly devalues the role played by other members of the group, it was fundamentally his project: he edited Blast, wrote the majority of its text (all of the content that I cite is his), and founded Vorticism’s aesthetic through his earlier artistic experiments. For a full discussion, see Paul Edwards, Wyndham Lewis: Painter and Writer (London, 2000), pp. 101-102. 2 Edwards, Lewis, p. 101. 3 Charles Harrison, English Art and Modernism 1900-1939 (London, 1981), p. 102. 2 catalogue of Charles Saatchi’s collection, as ‘the beginning of a vital period of optimism and enthusiasm’ in English art.4 In this dissertation, I will compare and contrast the internal and external workings of Vorticism and Young British Art with the schism between their appearances and realities firmly in mind. The course of my three chapters will chart this shift: beginning with their declaredly avant-garde intentions, through their populist artistic strategies and finally to the sensationalist devices upon which they rely. 4 Sarah Kent, Shark Infested Waters: The Saatchi Collection of British Art in the 90s (London, 1994), p. 6. 3 1. Avant-gardism Ian Munton’s entry on Vorticism for a recent companion guide to modernism demonstrates the extent to which it has been subsumed into the same art historical framework as Young British Art: [Vorticism] represents one of the rare occasions when a group of British artists, working together, maintained a distinctive movement over a period of time […] The only comparable movements are the Pre- Raphaelite Brotherhood of the 1850s and the Young British Artists (YBAs) of the 1990s.1 As I will argue in this chapter, the similarities bound up in this persuasive classification run much deeper than Munton describes. One doesn’t have to delve far into the scholarship surrounding Vorticism and Young British Art to uncover precisely why they have been cast in this way. Simply put, both Blast and Freeze represent the moment of a self-conscious break with establishment tradition by young, fresh-faced art school rebels. Whilst Freeze was famously hosted in a disused building in London’s Docklands by sixteen students and recent graduates of Goldsmiths College, six of the eight artists who signed Blast’s manifesto (including Lewis) had attended the Slade School of Art. Spurred on by a will to disassociate themselves from the concerns of the previous generations, these two groups subscribed to the popular myth of avant-garde bohemians operating to disrupt England’s otherwise mild artistic climate. A reading of Peter Bürger’s Theory of the Avant-Garde highlights how their self-proclaimed aims ‘can be defined as an attack on the status of art in bourgeois 1 Alan Munton, ‘Vorticism’, in A Companion Guide to Modernist literature and culture, ed. by David Bradshaw and Kevin J. H. Dettmar (Oxford, 2006), pp. 176-182 (p. 176). 4 society’.2 His presentation of the avant-gardist project to negate the ‘art for art’s sake’ mentality of aestheticism and embark upon a return to the ‘life praxis of men’ seems particularly relevant to the oppositional stance shared by Vorticism and Young British Art.3 In both cases, nihilistic and destructive tendencies were flaunted in a diversion away from the high aesthetic values sanctioned by their contemporary art establishments. Whilst the London artworld of the 1980s was preoccupied with what Julian Stallabrass has termed as ‘vague, universal truths about man, nature and the elements’, it had been presided over in the 1910s by similarly autonomous and moralising virtues.4 The art historian and critic Richard Cork, who has written extensively on Young British Art and Vorticism with effectively interchangeable prose, sets the scene by describing the latter’s ideological clash with Bloomsbury formalism: A sense of tradition was pitched against a need for iconoclasm; a regard for sensibility and cultivation clashed with a desire for virility and action; and a preference for pacific insights was flatly in contradiction with a thirst for aggressive discordance.5 By actively opposing the institutional privileging of historical, intellectual and ethical concerns in this way, the Vorticists and the YBAs can be seen to fulfil Bürger’s analysis of the opening-up of art to the gritty realities of life. When read through the confrontational strategies that it employed in order to do so, Blast lends itself particularly well to Serge Guilbaut’s observation that the ideology of twentieth century ‘modernism operated as an art of combat, employed by 2 Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. by Michael Shaw (Minneapolis, 1984), p. 49. 3 Bürger, p. 49. 4 Julian Stallabrass, High Art Lite: the Rise and Fall of Young British Art, 2nd ed. (London, 2006), p. 56. 5 Richard Cork, Vorticism and Abstract Art in the First Machine Age: Volume 1 Origins and Development (London, 1976), p. 96. 5 an avant garde which was often tied […] to the idea of revolution’.6 The magazine is regularly classified by scholarship as operating within this military lexicon.7 Its deployment of violently modern typographies and abstract designs are seen to act out a coordinated mobilisation of radical weaponry in the face of a tepid domestic artworld. By balancing every ‘blast’ and ‘curse’ with a ‘bless’, Lewis’s famous opening salvo recites the modernist incantation of effacing the old whilst simultaneously inscribing the new. Replete in his bombastic rhetoric, Blast is a manic vortex whirling to disperse the bourgeois clouds of England’s artistic mediocrity: a ‘flabby sky that can manufacture no snow, but can only drop the sea on us in a drizzle’.8 Although this critique was directed most voraciously against the cultural authority of the Royal Academy, other ancien régime perpetrators, such as the Slade School and Bloomsbury, were subject to equal vilification. As Paige Reynolds states, drawing a parallel to Bürger’s analysis, The vorticists imagined themselves in opposition to these groups, as a movement calculated to shock the British public and to reject the long tradition of Bourgeois academic art that these groups represented. From the vorticists’ perspective, these movements categorically sought to separate art from life.9 Young British Art’s rejection of aesthetic theory and artistic tradition must be mapped in relation to this negation and disruption of the contemporary establishment. In particular, Stallabrass has elaborated on the extent to which the new art precipitated by Freeze ‘attacked artists and conventions favoured by the established art world’ in 6 Serge Guilbaut, ‘Preface – The Relevance of Modernism’, in Modernism and Modernity: The Vancouver Conference Papers, ed.

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